Adversarial Limits of Quantum Certification: When Eve Defeats Detection

Quantum Physics arXiv:2512.04391 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 4 Dec 2025] Title:Adversarial Limits of Quantum Certification: When Eve Defeats Detection Authors:Davut Emre Tasar View a PDF of the paper titled Adversarial Limits of Quantum Certification: When Eve Defeats Detection, by Davut Emre Tasar View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Security of quantum key distribution (QKD) relies on certifying that observed correlations arise from genuine quantum entanglement rather than eavesdropper manipulation. Theoretical security proofs assume idealized conditions, practical certification must contend with adaptive adversaries who optimize their attack strategies against detection systems. Established fundamental adversarial limits for quantum certification using Eve GAN, a generative adversarial network trained to produce classical correlations indistinguishable from quantum. Our central finding: when Eve interpolates her classical correlations with quantum data at mixing parameter, all tested detection methods achieve ROC AUC = 0.50, equivalent to random guessing. This means an eavesdropper needs only 5% classical admixture to completely evade detection. Critically, we discover that same distribution calibration a common practice in prior certification studies inflates detection performance by 44 percentage points compared to proper cross distribution evaluation, revealing a systematic flaw that may have led to overestimated security claims. Analysis of Popescu Rohrlich (PR Box) regime identifies a sharp phase transition at CHSH S = 2.05: below this value, no statistical method distinguishes classical from quantum correlations; above it, detection probability increases monotonically. Hardware validation on IBM Quantum demonstrates that Eve-GAN achieves CHSH = 2.736, remarkably exceeding real quantum hardware performance (CHSH = 2.691), illustrating that classical adversaries can outperform noisy quantum systems on standard certification metrics. These results have immediate implications for QKD security: adversaries maintaining 95% quantum fidelity evade all tested detection methods. We provide corrected methodology using cross-distribution calibration and recommend mandatory adversarial testing for quantum security claims. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2512.04391 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2512.04391v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.04391 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Davut Emre Taşar [view email] [v1] Thu, 4 Dec 2025 02:24:04 UTC (13 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Adversarial Limits of Quantum Certification: When Eve Defeats Detection, by Davut Emre TasarView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2025-12 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)